Child Poverty Would Be Almost Twice As High If Safety Net Programs Didn't Exist: Report

Child poverty in the U.S. would be significantly worse if government assistance programs weren't in place, a new report suggests.

A study released on Wednesday by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an advocacy group for low-income kids, found that without government support programs -- like food assistance, housing subsidies and tax credits -- the child poverty rate would swell from 18 percent to 33 percent.

Conservatives to withdraw key benefits from unemployed under-25s

David Cameron on Wednesday signalled a major overhaul in benefits for 18- to 24-year-olds when he announced plans to withdraw housing benefit and jobseeker's allowance from many of the 1 million youngsters currently not in work, education or training.

At the end of a Conservative conference in Manchester dedicated to sending tough messages on welfare, party officials said the proposals for young people to be either "earning or learning" were a prime example of how a modern Tory state would not turn its back on the world, but instead "equip the vulnerable for the global race". The proposal was the only policy announcement in a speech dedicated to setting out the prime minister's vision of a society in which there is opportunity for all.

This Is What Happens When You Rip a Hole in the Safety Net

America’s social safety net, such as it is, has recently come under some scrutiny. Chana Joffe-Walt’s in-depth exploration of the increase in people getting Social Security Disability benefits at NPR got many listeners buzzing. Then in The Wall Street Journal, Damian Paletta and Caroline Porter looked at the increase in the use of food stamps, called SNAP. All three journalists look at the increasing dependence on these programs and come away puzzled: Why are so many people now getting disability and food stamp payments?

Conservatives destroying safety nets

We, the Atlantic caucus of the New Democratic Party, are greatly concerned about the effect recent changes to employment insurance will have not only on individual recipients, but also on the communities in our region. The Conservatives failed to hold consultations or study the long-term consequences of gutting the EI system before making changes that compromise the financial security of entire industries and the communities that depend on them.

Vulnerable Canadians are being pushed even deeper into poverty and this means that the federal government is offloading its responsibility onto provincial social assistance services. Currently, a record low of four in 10 unemployed Canadians are eligible for EI. Even for those few who are eligible for EI, many will be affected by the Conservatives’ abrupt cancellation of the program giving five extra weeks of benefits for claimants in high unemployment areas.

Americans, Western Europeans Divided On Society's Role In Protecting The Impoverished

More than an ocean divides the United States and Western Europe.

Americans are significantly less supportive of a social safety net than Western Europeans, and they are more likely to say that success is determined by one's own hard work rather than outside forces, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center.

In fact, 58 percent of surveyed Americans said it is most important for people to have the freedom to pursue life's goals, much more than the 35 percent who said it is more important to make sure no one else is in need.

In contrast, at least six in ten people in Germany, Spain, and France said it was more important to make sure that no one else is left in need.

Four Popular Safety-Net Programs Tea Party Republicans Have Turned Against

Imagine how much harder the last three years would have been without the safeguards erected over the past 80 years, in many cases with bipartisan support. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and unemployment insurance are the broadest, but there are also the programs specifically targeted toward low-income Americans: the earned income tax credit, community health centers, school lunch programs, and food stamps, to name a few.

These policies have two things in common. They've historically enjoyed high levels of support, not just from the Democratic Party, but from Republicans as well. And today's GOP plans to dismantle or seriously weaken all of them, setting back almost a century of progress.

This isn't a sudden lurch to the right, but the continuation of a process that has been in motion for decades. After Democratic president Lyndon Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights laws of the 1960s, conservative southern whites began breaking towards the Republicans. With these energetically reactionary voters added to their base, Republican elites could rely on more consistently hardline support for a platform consisting largely of tax breaks for the wealthy and attacking social programs.

"We have a new breed of Republican that is much more radical," says Peter Edleman, expert on social insurance programs and an assistant secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration. "Every time the Republicans come to power, they are more conservative. Reagan was very negative about a whole series of programs that helped low-income people, Gingrich was worse than Reagan and now the Tea Party is the worst we've seen."

Below you will find four examples of social programs that used to be supported by Republicans (at least some of them), but have suffered sustained attack over the last thee years.

School Lunch Programs

Ensuring that American students can attend school with full bellies seems like the most uncontroversial public policy of all time. Besides the obvious common decency argument, multiple studies show that children learn better when they aren't hungry.

Free school lunch programs were originally instituted following World War II and the basics of the program are reauthorized every five years. The last time it was up for reauthorization, as the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, it passed both houses of Congress unanimously. (Only Ron Paul voted against the iteration before that.)

Not so last year, when the Child Nutrition Bill met the Tea Party. Sure, the bill was a little larger this time and it included some additional guidelines to encourage a more nutritious diet. "The bills are very, very similar," says Joel Berg, author of All You Can Eat: How Hungry is America? and who served eight years at the Clinton administration's US Department of Agriculture (which oversees many of the government's anti-hunger programs).

But House Republicans used these changes as an excuse to vote against the bill en masse. Despite the Obama administration's desperate concessions to get more Republicans on board, 157 of the 170 member House Republican caucus voted against the bill. And they've continued their crusade against healthy school meals since gaining a majority in the House.

"The last two times it passed Congress with virtually no controversy," says Berg. "That's a huge change. Lots of people have gone after food stamps. But going after school meals, I don't know if the Grinch would do that. But House Republicans do. If they can't be for healthier school meals for kids what can they be for?"

Food Stamps

As Berg points out, food stamps--now officially known as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)--have encountered greater conservative opposition than school lunch programs. But the program has also obtained significant levels of Republican support throughout its history. Which makes sense: food stamps are certainly a more conservative alternative to, say, cash assistance programs, which have long been derided by the GOP.

Indeed, Richard Nixon and his administration advocated for and oversaw a significant expansion of the program and laid the groundwork for the groundbreaking Food Stamp Reform bill 1977, which created the program as we know it today. Powerful conservative senators like Robert Dole and Richard Lugar allied with their Democratic counterparts to strengthen food stamps.

Ronald Reagan initially instituted significant cuts in food stamps, but the program was expanded again in 1985 and 1987. While Newt Gingrich and his ilk were venomous in their opposition, George W. Bush seemed to be a quiet supporter. In 2002, he advocated the restoration of food stamp eligibility to many legal immigrants who had been denied it as a result of a Clinton-era concession to the right. Eric Bost, the Bush administration's Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, said, "I assure you, food stamps is not welfare."

But Eric Bost is long gone. Earlier this year, Paul Ryan proposed, and the House Republican caucus approved, a budget that included a plan to make SNAP a block grant program, similar to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, or what remains of welfare). This would be a disaster. Block grants mean that each state will get a set chunk on money for food stamps every year. The amount of money can't rise with need, so if a bunch of new people become eligible for food stamps--because of, say, a massive recession--the states will be unable to add them to the SNAP rolls. To make matters worse, the amount of money granted to the states for SNAP will be at the mercy of inflation and will be worth less every year. If TANF is anything to go by, the lump sum won't be increased, and food stamps will cover fewer and fewer people every year.

This draconian policy proposal was approved by almost every Republican in the House, including former anti-hunger advocates like Frank Wolf (R-VA) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-MO). All but five Senate Republicans voted for Ryan's budget too, including Lugar. The Democratic majority in the upper chamber defeated the Ryan bill, but Lugar, personifying the GOP's hard-right swing on this policy, proposed deep cuts to the program a few months later.

Community Health Centers

Community health centers have existed since the 1960s, introduced as part of the War on Poverty and really taking off in the 1970s. These health centers are meant to provide quality healthcare regardless of income or insurance status (they are generally priced on a sliding scale).

Conservatives have appreciated the fact that community health centers are phenomenally cost-effective. According to the National Association of Community Health Centers, the "Estimated Total Medical Savings Per Person" for center patients in 2009 was $1,262. Another study shows that health centers save $24 billion a year.

No less a conservative than George W. Bush was a big fan, doubling federal spending on community health centers during his presidency. He called them "an integral part of the healthcare system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms."

It wasn't just the president who supported community health centers. The Health Care Safety Net Act, which passed in 2008, was entirely uncontroversial with hardly a hand raised against it.

Fast-forward three years, and GOP attitudes have changed dramatically. In 2011, the House decimated the $2.2 billion in appropriations annually allocated to health center funding, cutting more than one-third of the budget. The Affordable Care Act provided funds to further expand the number of community health centers across the nation, but the money mostly had to fill in the gaps left by Republican marauding instead. If the reduced annual appropriations remain in effect past 2014 the money from the Affordable Care Act will dry up, leaving community health centers with less federal support than they won in 2008. Millions could be left without care.

The Earned Income Tax Credit

Conservatives love shaking their heads in righteous consternation and asking: "Did you know that only 53 percent of Americans pay taxes?" They've even got a Tumblr about it.

This juicy little sound bite ignores several key points. First, those 47 percent of people who "don't pay taxes" actually just don't owe any federal income taxes, largely because they don't have much income. Second, they do pay state, local, sales, payroll, gasoline, and other excise taxes -- federal income taxes made up just 22.7 percent of all taxes paid in this country last year. (Note that rich people get to avoid the vast majority of their payroll taxes, which represent about the same share of the total as federal income taxes.) Third, the reason many of the so-called 47 percent don't pay income taxes is because of the earned income tax credit (EITC), a policy instituted in the 1970s as a more conservative way to boost working-class incomes than the minimum wage.

The EITC essentially rewards parents who work hard for low pay with a break on their incomes taxes and, in many cases, a refund. It was expanded and greatly strengthened under Ronald Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986, which indexed it to inflation so the benefit wouldn't stagnate. He declared the tax program "the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job-creation measure to come out of Congress." To a lesser degree George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush beefed the EITC up too, while the latter also allowed bipartisan moderates to expand access to the child tax credit to low-income people too.

"It's a real blend of conservative and liberal values," says Chuck Marr, director of federal tax policy for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. "If you talk to average people, this is one that Americans are generally for: a big catch for [American attitudes towards social programs] is that the person on the receiving end is doing their best and working hard. [By that logic], the earned income tax credit is something conservatives should like."

That's not the way today's GOP sees it. The "We are the 53 Percent" nonsense is an implicit attack on the earned income tax credit. But there have been plenty of explicit attacks as well from Senator John Cornyn, R-Tex., to conservative Fox News anchors who deride it as "a form of welfare income redistribution." More substantively, Republican state politicians are actively attempting to slash the program and Tea Party icon and presidential candidate Michele Bachmann has promised to "do away with EITC," if she is elected.

The Democratic majority in the Senate and President Obama's veto pen have defeated many of the worst of these reactionary excesses. But what happens if, and when, the Republicans have a more powerful position in Washington, D.C.? So much for compassionate conservatism.

Origin
Source: Huff 

Welfare Reform Leaving More In Poverty

Sasha Mandel says she never imagined going on welfare. But her plans for a career and the independence she craved ran headlong into a pair of unforeseen developments -- an unplanned pregnancy at 18, and the worst job market since the Great Depression.

In April 2009, freshly unemployed and devoid of savings, Mandel reluctantly walked into a state office in Phoenix to apply for welfare. Her caseworker was sympathetic, swiftly arranging emergency food aid along with cash assistance. But she was also clear on the limits of that relief: Under the terms of Arizona’s welfare program, Mandel could draw a welfare check for no more than three years.

That timeframe was about to get shorter. This April, cash-strapped Arizona tightened the limit on welfare payments to two years. Mandel learned about the change when she received a letter from the state in June. She was only a few weeks away from exhausting her benefits.

“That letter," she said, "it just said to me that they decided to change the rules when the game for single mothers is already really, really hard."

Fifteen years after President Clinton joined with congressional Republicans and affixed his signature to a law that “ended welfare as we know it” -- imposing a five-year time limit on federal cash assistance for poor families, while allowing states to set shorter limits -- the social safety net is failing to keep pace with the needs of struggling Americans, many experts say. Millions of single mothers are falling through the cracks, scrambling to support their families with neither paychecks nor government aid.

Welfare reform, one of the hallmark events of the Clinton presidency, was supposed to be a healthy tradeoff: Single mothers who had grown dependent on government checks would instead go out and work. The federal government gave the states lump sums of money, known as block grants, to create programs that would prepare, prompt and push poor single mothers accustomed to living on welfare into the workforce, providing job training, resume-writing tutorials and subsidized child care.

But the time limits on cash aid were enacted in the mid-1990s, in the midst of one of the most vibrant job markets in modern times. Today, with nearly 14 million people officially out of work and jobseekers outnumbering available positions by more than four-to-one, the logic of those reforms is being overwhelmed by the reality of a stark shortage of paychecks, experts say.

“Today, everybody is expected to work,” said Sheila Zedlewski, an economist at the Urban Institute and co-author of an institute study released last week that examines the consequences of welfare reform during the recession. “The problem is finding a job is incredibly hard.”

Since the beginning of the recession in late 2007, the nation’s unemployment rate has increased by 88 percent, while welfare caseloads have grown just 14 percent, according to the Urban Institute report.

Experts say this disparity reflects the inadequacy of remaining welfare programs in the face of a veritable epidemic of joblessness. During a period of national distress, fewer and fewer people have been able to secure help to meet their basic needs, according to the report.

Between 2007 and 2010 -- just as the economy was contracting and joblessness was rising, generating greater demand for public assistance -- welfare caseloads dropped in 13 states, according to the Urban Institute report. In Arizona, which faced a particularly powerful blow to its finances in the form of a sustained plunge in housing prices, the welfare caseload dropped by 48 percent during that timeframe.

Many of those who advocated for ending welfare as an unlimited entitlement say the change has been beneficial -- the share of single, never married mothers in the workforce climbed from 62.9 percent in 1996 to 72.4 percent a decade later, according to federal data.

“Poverty rates are still lower and work rates still higher than before welfare reform,” said Ron Haskins, who played a key role in shaping the policy as a senior Republican congressional adviser, and who is now co-director of the Brookings Center on Children and Families. “In that sense, welfare reform has been a success.”

But as Haskins acknowledges, the reforms have never managed to address the barriers confronting a small subset of welfare recipients with very limited education, significant physical and mental health problems, or unhealthy children, preventing them from entering the workforce.

The share of people who both live in poverty with no reported income and lack welfare assistance has changed significantly since welfare reform. In 1996, 1 in 8 single mothers fit this profile, according to Zedlewski. By 2008, the most recent year for which this data is available, that figure had climbed to 1 in 5, she said.

In the early days after welfare reform, many states enacted stricter time limits, Arizona included, and beefed up programs offering subsidized child care -- a crucial component for single mothers required to work. The budget crisis assailing states has prompted many states to effectively roll back these programs.

States around the country are slashing cash benefits, reducing time limits and, in some cases, imposing strict work requirements on welfare applicants, said LaDonna Pavetti, an expert on welfare who works at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The practices also make it very hard for parents already dealing with a job crisis, a disability or other complications to qualify for cash aid, she said.

In the 2000s, states also began shifting federal funds that could be used for cash benefits for single mothers to cover other costs. Some of the money went to cover the cost of child care or transportation assistance. But large shares were also used to fund state child welfare agencies, which frequently don’t get all the resources they need from states.

In 1997, the first year the reforms took effect in most states, Georgia used 73 percent of its federal welfare block grant to provide cash aid to poor families, according to data the state reported to the federal government. By 2009, the most recent year for which complete data is available, Georgia spent just 11 percent of its block grant on cash aid. Spending in Florida, Texas and Arizona plunged by similar margins.

The impact of these cuts is easy to discern: Far fewer poor families are being given cash assistance. In 2009, Georgia and Texas each provided cash aid to less than 10 percent of poor families, according to the Urban Institute report.

"You have so many people who were pushed off welfare who didn't find work in the beginning, and today there are so many people who can't get welfare at all," said Peter Edelman, a Georgetown University law professor who resigned from a senior position in the Clinton administration to protest the President's decision to sign welfare reform into law. "As an anti-recessionary tool, welfare as we know it today is useless."

Edelman compares the paltry expansion of the nation's welfare rolls during the recession -- from about 3.9 million families in 2007 to about 4.4 million families in 2010 -- to what happened to the food stamp program. During the same time period, food stamp program participation rose from about 30 million households to 44 million, reflecting real levels of economic need.

"What we've done is make things worse," Edelman said. "There are now people who cannot find work, and who can not get welfare."

INTO THE GREAT RECESSION

When Mandel walked across the stage at her high school graduation in Phoenix in the spring of 2008, she was walking into an economy that was already in the midst of a punishing downturn.

She soon managed to secure a receptionist job at a doctor’s office in a Phoenix suburb for $10 an hour. Getting there entailed riding the bus nearly two hours in each direction. But she was pleased to be employed; pleased to have what she considered a “good-paying job” for a person fresh out of high school.

Two weeks later, she found a second job in downtown Phoenix helping to organize fundraisers for a nonprofit that works with the disabled. It paid $9 an hour and involved its own hour and a half bus commute.

Mandel had survived what she described as an unstable childhood, which included a move from California to Arizona when she was 13 so that her mother could follow "some man." She spent her high school years living in a group home. The state placed her there after her mother was sent to prison, she said. (Mandel said she doesn’t remember the precise charge.)

Given that background, Mandel said she was particularly keen to establish her own household, and she was clear that money was something she was going to need. But two months after her high school graduation, Mandel found out she was pregnant. The baby’s father, her high school boyfriend, already had one child. The relationship ended before Mandel delivered. She is awaiting a court date at which she hopes he will be ordered to pay child support, she said.

In early 2009, physically drained by her long commute, she quit her suburban doctor’s office job to focus full time on her fundraising responsibilities in Phoenix. She took satisfaction in working with the disabled. But the recession took a toll on fundraising -- and in March 2009, she was laid off.

“I know they really liked me," Mandel said. "I really loved that job, but they couldn’t afford to keep me."

At the time, Mandel, who speaks in chirpy sentences punctuated by nervous laughter, was living in a drama-filled, crowded house just outside Phoenix, staying with a friend’s family. She was seven months pregnant and cognizant that competition for jobs was fierce. Yet she remained confident she would find a job.

But her spirits soon took a blow as she launched her search for work. At an interview for a restaurant job, her status as a single mother quickly emerged as a disqualifier, she said.

“The manager just told me, ‘Why would I hire you when I have like 10 people with college degrees and no children who want this job?’” she recalled. “’They aren’t going to need to leave when there is a problem with day care.’ That really opened my eyes. I didn't stop looking, but I kind of knew I might not find anything.”

Mandel applied for unemployment benefits. But as a part-time worker who had been with her past employer for less than a year, she did not qualify.

One morning in late March 2009, she went to a central Phoenix welfare office, waiting two hours for her turn to meet with a caseworker. Eight months pregnant, she lumbered into her caseworker’s paper-jammed cubicle and confronted a barrage of questions.

Where was she living? (By then, in a transitional homeless shelter.) How much money did she have in the bank? (None.) What had she done to try to find work? (Looked and looked, to no avail.) Who was the baby’s father? (A man who was working part time and could hardly pay his own bills.)

By the end of the interview, Mandel had a debit card that enabled her to immediately draw the electronic equivalent of food stamps. As far as the state was concerned, she was a woman in crisis.

The social worker explained that in a few weeks, she would begin receiving $210 per month in cash assistance.

“They told me that it would only last three years so I would have to use the time wisely,” Mandel said. “She was real clear about that.”

Since that warning, Mandel has been on so many interviews that she said she has lost count. Each one requires a bus trip -- usually half an hour or more -- or asking a friend for a ride. The sorts of jobs she is now willing to take have expanded: “Absolutely anything that’s legal and pays.”

She has had a few short-lived jobs. In the fall of 2009, Mandel secured a three-month internship with a local nonprofit helping other young people plan and execute their path to higher education. She was hired as a nanny, but two weeks later her employer lost his job and could no longer afford her time. She was nearly hired to work at a community center, but she failed the required math test.

Between jobs and failed job applications, Mandel has participated in job search and training programs assigned by her caseworker -- a requirement to keep her cash assistance and the day care voucher provided by the state of Arizona.

“I’d like to work," she said. "But it’s like, where are the jobs?”

When her welfare benefits ended in July, so did her child care voucher, putting her in the ultimate single mother catch-22: Without a job, she cannot afford child care, and without child care, how can she work?

Last week, Mandel skipped a job interview for the first time in two years because she was unable to arrange child care. Toddlers are not well received on job interviews, she said.

She was was busy moving into a new, low-cost South Phoenix apartment that the city helped her secure back when she still had her welfare benefits.

Keeping her apartment requires that she find a job in the next six weeks. She will need to cover her $468 monthly rent and her $72 cellphone bill, not to mention the cost of day care, bus passes and the inevitable clothing she has to buy for her growing 2-year-old daughter, Nevaeh.

“I’m not really sure what I can do,” she said. “I’m looking everywhere for an escape. Well, some kind of job."

Origin
Source: Huffington